


Dolorous Violet

by lea_hazel



Category: Long Live the Queen (Video Game)
Genre: Absent Parents, Challenge Response, Coming of Age, Community: trope_bingo, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Magic Is Not a Toy!, Mentors, Post-Game(s), Religion, Royalty, cruel!Elodie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-01
Updated: 2013-10-01
Packaged: 2017-12-28 03:47:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/987299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lea_hazel/pseuds/lea_hazel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Charlotte inherits the position of crown princess and all that it entails, and with it the legacy of Elodie's cruelty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dolorous Violet

I.

Her uncle was grave and sorrowful when he greeted her carriage. As they walked through the palace Charlotte felt many eyes on her, the silent sidelong glances of servants too well-trained to stare, too pious to speak ill of the dead. Charlotte knew they were wondering about her. The future Queen of Nova was an unknown quantity, sequestered all her life by an overprotective father and an ambitious mother, until the untimely death of the Princess pushed her near the top of the succession.

Lottie hadn't even known she was third in line to the throne, not until after the Queen's death. Even then it was not her parents who told her; she'd learned it through the gossip network that ran through the letters of the nobility's youth. She had prayed, every week, that Elodie would be crowned so that she would never have to think of it again. Lottie had no desire to be Queen of Nova, but Elodie's death made her ascension a near-certainty. Assuming she survived to her fifteenth birthday, as Elodie had not.

When had she realized that Elodie was different? That her beloved cousin and childhood playmate wasn't like other girls? It must have been before the Royal Ball, that dreadful day. Certainly before they met at Gwenelle's birthday party. Maybe it was after the death of Queen Fidelia, after Elodie had been taken out of school, during her family's all-too-brief visit to the palace. When threats of assassination started rolling in, sweeping all other concerns in their path. That was her second-to-last meeting with her only cousin.

Lottie had always considered Elodie her best friend. They had played together all their lives. Elodie was so much more adventurous than her, dragging her along to climb every tree in the palace gardens, always getting both of them into all kinds of trouble. But her mother, the Queen, indulged her. She wanted them to remain children for as long as possible, before inevitability set in and they became their roles; the Crown Princess and the Heir to the Duchy of Merva, the next generation of Nova's royal family.

II.

Her father remained in Merva, with the children. An appellation which no longer included Charlotte. With her mother gone, it was agreed that she must live and study in the Royal Palace under the king’s auspices. By law, her father should be king and she his heir as they were both direct descendants of Queen Ladesh, and King Joslyn was not. Yet the Duke refused to take the throne. He was grieving for his wife and sister still, he said. He had young children to care for. Instead he sent his eldest daughter and named his brother-in-law regent.

Was she not also his child? Should he not be caring for her, too? Mother would never have sent her into this vipers’ nest with no protection. If the Duke grieved for his wife, did not Charlotte also grieve for her mother, and her aunt, and even her cousin Elodie? Not Elodie-as-queen, distant and cruel, but the Elodie she had run and played with, the Elodie she knew. And the girl she might have been, they might both have been, if her mother had survived.

If the King wondered whether she was fit to succeed his late daughter, he never shared that concern with her. If he feared that she possessed the same seed of cruelty that had galvanized the Princess, or the ambition that had been her own mother's downfall, still he remained silent. After the first day when he had met her at the gates and showed her through the palace he hardly spoke to her at all. The King's auspices were very quiet ones, apparently. Most days Charlotte conversed with no one but her tutors. When it came to decisions of state, or her own education, he had little to say.

III.

Until the Duchess of Ursul returned to the capital. Undaunted by the circumstances of her royally mandated exile, she presented herself to the Princess with a chill composure which Charlotte both admired and resented. Despite the malevolence which King Joslyn clearly held for her, she never flinched. She simply met her eyes and told her to seek out her birthright, the ancestral magic of Nova's kings and queens.

Lumen magic had always been widely feared. The Duchess had told Lottie that fear was motivated by jealousy, the rancor that the weak held for the strong. The King had said that Lumen magic was what had killed his wife, Queen Fidelia. Charlotte herself was more worried about who had been killed _with_ it than _by_ it; Elodie's shows of magic during her brief tenure had become the stuff of horrified gossip and dread midnight tales.

Yet the eyes of the Duchess of Ursul still bored into her, demanding that she accept her tutelage and become Nova's next Lumen Queen. Her uncle watched her also, his eyes grievous with silent judgment. Could she risk alienating her regent? Could she afford to shut the door on her Lumen powers forever? If she banished the Duchess a second time, she would surely not return a third. Not while she, the Princess, lived, although perhaps that wouldn’t be all that long.

At the palace's chapel, Charlotte sought out the books of lore that spoke of Lumen power and the storied history of Nova's kings and queens. She had arrived at the palace ignorant of everything to do with Lumen power, except the drips and drabs her mother had occasionally doled out. Among the few things she'd brought with her from Merva was a crumpled letter which Elodie had sent her only weeks before her death. That was when Lottie had first learned about her own power.

Lumen crystals were rare. Only the royal family and the dukes of Ursul were meant to carry them. Yet Duchess Lucille had carried a Lumen crystal of her own, on that dreadful day when she died. A crystal which now lay hidden somewhere in the royal palace, locked no doubt within the deepest vaults and under heavy guard. The royal crystal which had belonged to her grandmother was lost at sea with Elodie’s body, never to be retrieved. If the Princess was to become the next Lumen Queen of Nova, she must use her mother’s birthright. King Joslyn, she knew, had no intention of allowing this.

IV.

Charlotte allowed Duchess Julianna to remain in the capital, although not in the palace. Her mother would have said that indecision makes her look weak. Her mother would not have allowed Charlotte to show indecision, or decision, or anything else. If Duchess Lucille were alive, she would not be content to let her daughter choose her own lessons and her own way; things were done as she pleased in Merva, or they were not done at all.

Yet her mother was dead, and her father absent, and her uncle disinterested. And Charlotte had no one at her back except the specter of the late Princess Elodie, whispering in her ear about the power that Julianna offered and all the ways in which it could be abused. Her sleep grew restless, and she found peace only at the chapel. At least the priestess who supervised her prayer and taught her meditation looked upon her with a kind eye and a gentle smile.

Her tutors were often displeased with her. ' _The princess is easily distracted by her moods, and often it seems as though she remembers nothing of what she was taught._ ' Lessons would flee her mind as soon as the book was shut. If she tried to master a graceful style of walk, a curtsey, a dance move, her feet would trip up from under her. For the first time in her life, Lottie felt graceless, almost as though her arms and legs and feet belonged to someone else, as though she commanded them and they disobeyed. Would her subjects rebel as her own limbs now did? Whenever her lessons failed her Charlotte would flee to the chapel where the priestess would tend her many bruises and murmur reassuring words.

Once, she had climbed down into the crypt where the royal family was buried. She would someday be buried there, as would her father and siblings. Her mother’s body was interred in Merva; she was not royalty, and held no privileges in the palace. Charlotte envied her when she descended into that grim stony tomb. At least Lucille’s grave was at the top of a green hill, overlooking the rolling fields of wheat that gave Merva its wealth, where a light warm breeze blew all summer and birds nested in the ancient oak trees. That night, she dreamed that men came in the night to take her sleeping body down to the royal crypt and seal it there. When she woke she was soaked in cold sweat.

V.

The days melted into weeks, and the weeks into a year. A full year since the naval battle that had claimed her cousin’s life. King Joslyn ordered a public memorial, which he suggested Charlotte should conduct. The people, he said, want to see their future queen. If he meant the resentful crowd that reluctantly gathered in the city square under a gray, drizzling sky, he had an interesting view of ' _want_ '. A murmur of discontent rose from the crowd which even she could not mistake. The commoners did not want another Lumen Queen.

At the advice of her tutor, she elected to omit the traditional oratory and instead lead the crowd in prayer. With sweaty palms and a dry mouth she stood at the wooden pulpit, stiff in her heavy regalia, and recited the prayers which she had spoken for as long as she could remember. For the good of the land, for a bountiful harvest, for the rains of winter, for peace. When she stepped down she felt as though her vision tunneled and she hardly knew that her uncle led her by arm to the carriage that took them both back to the palace.

“You did well,” he told her on the way, and his face bore the same somber mask as it did the day she arrived, his voice dispassionate as ever. Could she be blamed if she assumed he was only trying to spare her feelings?

When she retreated to the safety of the chapel, Selene was the first one, the only one, who told her otherwise. The omens, she said, were auspicious. They showed her holding and keeping the favor of the commoners. Her antecedent, she said, had earned no such regard. The people were inspired by her faith, and her compassion endeared her to them. Winning the affections of the commoners was a feat which would have to turn the nobility’s attitudes to her cause.

VI.

Charlotte had not realized that she had a cause.

But she did, of course. The Reign of Queen Charlotte the First was her cause, not because she wished to rule, but because she wished to survive. She would thrive only as queen. The ghost of her mother had been right all along. Charlotte _was_ weak, and no one suffered for it more than she herself. It no longer mattered if she wanted the throne, or the crystal, because they were hers, and no one would bear that burden for her. And if she was going to do more than survive, if she would prosper and succeed, it would not be because she shirked her duty or attended it with half a heart.

Prayer had stilled her heart. Finally she was without fear, without doubt, numb and distant as though watching her own life from some high vantage, a story unfolding in a children’s history book. When she strode the halls of the palace, _her_ palace, she walked with a sure, unwavering step, and those whom she met turned away from her path and let her pass. Had done so, she suddenly realized, for months. When she spoke her voice was soft, but clear and decisive, and it rang clear if only because every other voice was stilled and not a murmur passed through the room. When she visited the chapel for her lessons she felt a clarity that she had not known was hers all along.

In six months Charlotte would turn fifteen. She faced a coronation, her greatest fear since the time when she had learned there was something to be afraid of. Less than half a year, and she would be forced to kneel before every noble in the kingdom and pray to receive their oaths of fealty and not the edge of a sword. If they offered her the throne it would only be because she had first offered them her throat, and perhaps that was what Elodie had failed to understand almost two years ago. Perhaps Charlotte now knew a secret that her antecedent had not discovered and that knowledge would be the key to her survival.  


End file.
